


a drop through darkened sea

by bibliocratic



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Hurt Martin, M/M, Protective Jon, non-graphic injury, post-160, the Archive's Apocalypse Adventures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:35:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21736948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliocratic/pseuds/bibliocratic
Summary: The landscape stretches out around them, relentless and featureless, and there is no one coming.Martin's head lolls down, like he's dropping off, like they're back at the safe-house, and he's grown dozy and pliant from the fire in the grate. And Jon thinks, not, not like this, it can't be like this.Or: You can strike a lot of things. Strike terror. Strike fear. Strike gold.Strike a bargain.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 33
Kudos: 405





	a drop through darkened sea

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from: Nocturne - Blanco White. 
> 
> Tags in the end notes.

The temperature has plummeted like a stone poorly struck off water. The vaulted ceiling of empty un-garnished sky is grey, and Jon wonders if it might snow.

He limps further on his misdrawn trajectory, reeling and floundering with exhaustion. He feels beached and empty, and he counts his out-breathes like milestones, and around him the waves offer the expansive greeting of nothing but more steps, more sea.

He shouts again, _Martin_. Over and over, the sound dribbling out over his lips with the seasoning of blood he's coated in. _Martin, Martin._ The shush of water riding up shoreline steals the sounds of his exclamations, retreats jealously. The fog crushes with all the density of a forest grown wild.

He's not even sure he's speaking aloud at all.

 _Martin_ , the shape of his mouth forms. _Martin._

He's dripping blood like some charnel visitation on this cold-wrecked shore. Most of it isn't his. Jon felt the acrid, panting excitement of the Hunt as teeth vied to split his voice from his throat, but he tore all they were from them first. The weight of their knowledge sits like a heavy meal in his stomach, the bloom and burst of blood gouts decorating his shirt and trousers.

The damage was done though. Martin out of his eye-line for a handful of scant moments, already felled by a thumping claw that raked across his chest. Jon couldn't see him, Jon couldn't protect him, and that was all the Lonely needed to approach and embrace its most favoured and rebellious child.

 _Show him to me!_ The words escape the snarled wool of his thoughts to be enacted on his tongue. He feels the effort of Compulsion leaching the spotted and dessicated fumes of his strength so already over-stretched. The words floor him like heartache, cut the strings of his limbs so he slumps graceless onto the damp and sucking sand of this impervious and undemanding beach, his agonised cry stolen before it can trail from his lips.

He raises his head, ( _Martin, Martin_ ) and it is such a weight.

There's something ahead. Collapsed, gloved in the thickest part of the fog, a great structure committed to ruin. Jon's fingers drag grooves into the silt that the sea will thoughtlessly paint over as he hobbles closer.

He can sense the blanketing numb totality of the Lonely, and it will not take Martin, it will not.

“Martin,” he gasps, “Thank god, Martin, Martin....” The sounds run together into senselessness.

It is hard, to push Martin over onto his back. His limbs leaden, unwieldy, the sand coating his jacket and trousers like he's being made into the foundations of this nowhere place. Jon's arms are spindly, and he swears and rages aloud in a desperate frustration, _come on come on_ , as he fails in his quest, the first, the second time.

There's more blood than he was expecting, and Jon's insides cauterize into a terror.

He tries to rouse him without success. He tears off his own scarf to compact against the slashing wounds of the Hunt's talons, directly across his chest like a sickening bandoleer. Martin's eyes are open, their colour dissipated to merge with the surroundings, brown lost to the grey of fallout ash.

Jon doesn't have the energy to spare.

“ _Look at me Martin, please,_ ” he says anyway. He feels things inside him wrench, stutter.

“J'n?” Martin mumbles, and he almost sobs, to hear the reedy cold-shocked presence of it. “Is that... are you...?”

Time plays a cruel and teasing liar in this place. For Jon, it might have been close to an hour, searching the shores of this place. For Martin...

“I'm here,” Jon babbles, nauseous with relief. “I'm here, god, I came as soon as I could.”

Martin is blinking away the sediment build-up of unshed tears and they roll down his face, shrivelling in the strict grip of the cold.

“I thought,” he says thinly, “I thought I was going to die alone.”

“You aren't going to die,” Jon bites out, and it only has the ghost of a furious intensity but the sentiment soaks in it. He feels the Loneliness recede, with a slowness that's impartially mocking. “You aren't going to die. I won't let you.”

The colour-stripped beach gives away to more familiar territory, the landscape they were traversing before the Hunt sprung their trap. There's a pathway, lined solemnly with bowing trees, opposed by a dry-stone wall, and the mud compacted by the cold. And it is _cold_ Jon is realising. The bitter nails of it scratching the exposed flesh of his face.

Lazy shapes twist and bob on the air before his eyes.

“Martin,” he says, shaking him. “Martin, hey, look. Snow. It's snowing.”

 _I don't think I've seen snow, for, well, for years now,_ Martin had told him as they tramped further south, and they felt the terminal worsening of the weather in the scrubby harsh vegetation, the short weak-willed promise of daylight lessening daily. _Don't get it much, do you, in London. Either it's, you know, too cold, or it just falls as rain. Or that slushy stuff._

 _We better hope it doesn't,_ Jon had replied, _don't know what form it will take. And it'll make travelling harder._

Martin had nodded, and hummed, but had looked off wistful, with a long gaze like staring off a pier to the snow-capped mountains to the west.

 _Why do you want it to snow so much anyway?_ Jon had asked curiously, and Martin almost buried his freckles with the intensity of a sunrise blush that snapped across his cheeks. But he had told him. And Jon had smiled, and said _unbelievable,_ his fondness swelling in him like a river bursting banks.

“Come on, Martin,” Jon says, watching the shades of him trickle back from monochrome, filling up the etched bramble-shock of his dark hair, the scattering of freckles cast over his face like thrown dice. The violent lines of red over his coat. “We need to... you need to get up. We'll find a... there's a village. It's not far, I promise it's not, and there's a house on its outskirts, empty. We can, we can even get a fire going, yeah? But you need to get up. And then when we've.... when you're patched up, we can do all the things you wanted to do if it ever snowed. Every daft romantic thing. I promise. Come on, _please._ ”

Martin's attention is slipping in and out. The snow is getting worse. Jon moves Martin up to raise him from the frozen ground, to heft him up so he's cradled on his lap, bundled into the claws of his grip. Martin cries out softly, almost confused, and Jon's apologies are religiously fervent but borrowed to coalesce with the rising wind.

The snow is starting to layer over them. Jon's body trying to crane over, a cramped den of heat, but it's not enough, and the tumult is beginning to drive down fast. Martin's breaths are coming out in weakening plumes, and they need to move. They need to. Jon doesn't have the strength. His own vision wavers like a weakening signal. Martin is starting to shiver, from cold or from shock, and Jon, despair slip-streaming through gaps like smoke to choke the caverns of him, doesn't know which is worse.

The landscape stretches out around them, relentless and featureless, and there is no one coming.

Martin's head lolls down, like he's dropping off, like they're back at the safe-house, and he's grown dozy and pliant from the fire in the grate. And Jon thinks, _not, not like this, it can't be like this._

There's a hole at the core of him, dug out rotten by a burrowing worm. Jon's manned the perforations it left, the chiselled circles it drilled to puppet him to its will, and he's guarded it with such dedication, such a fear of relapse. He had pressed a knife into Martin's palm and made him promise to end him, should it ever take him completely again, if there was no other way, and Martin had retracted, angry and upset and appalled, and Jon had kept insisting, _please Martin_ until he'd unhappily agreed. He dreams of words scoring up the side of his throat as he scrabbles to keep them down, of an oil-slick of another's voice on his tongue.

 _Not like this,_ Jon repeats, and wrenches open the door he's kept shut with such will. Inside, for outside his body is hardening like a crooked statue around Martin's slow-breathing body, he screams a name into the emptiness that is not empty as the flooding sensation of _everything_ dashes him against the rocks of his comprehension.

Submerged and gagging on the flotsam-and-jetsam wash of terror, he feels a delighted flicker that oozes a muggy heat through him. Bubbles the space so he's mercifully cut off and trapped all at once with the entity he has summoned.

_To what do I owe the pleasure, Archivist?_

The attention of Jonah Magnus snakes up against him, coils through and around and in him, like a thread being ravelled through his skin. Jon shudders and flinches and Martin's dead-weight is a grounding to a reality he's scrambling to grip to the cliff-edge of.

 _You know what,_ he seethes, bites out. He thought at least here, the pieces of the game might have been pushed to the sides of the board.

 _I would see it for myself,_ Jonah responds lazily, as though it's an errant scattering of an idea he's just been visited by.

There is a snarling, like a catching of wool on wire, and Jon gasps with a broken shout at the impression of being twisted out like wet cloth as Jonah's mind pushes his own to one side. He feels the sensation of blurred vision inside of him, of two gazes peering out of one set of eyes. Jonah makes a vibration in what might be his throat as he looks imperiously down at the paling body in Jon's arms. He recedes dismissively as a wave like he's seen all necessary, and Jon is left mind-rocked and re-stabilising for a moment.

 _Oh Jon,_ Jonah says, and there's a smugness that cuts thick there. _And you tried so hard to keep him safe. That's all of them now, isn't it? Just like Gertrude in the end, so careless with your things._

 _There's a house,_ Jon bears down with splintering patience. _I don't have the.... I need, I can fix this, I just need strength. You can do that, you can... you can lend me some, to get us there, and then I can, I can save him._

 _As humanitarian as your cause no doubt is,_ Jonah replies with all the curled-lip aloof callousness of Elias, _I fail to see my role._

Jon breathes out, feels the frigid crackling material of Martin's coat of his fingers. He isn't fooled. The voice of Jonah Magnus is a pulsing, gangrenous intrusion inside his head, growing thick like mould the longer he is left undisturbed. Jon can feel every texture of what he feels that could pass as emotion, the stifling gloating, his heady delight at having _won_ , at being so easily offered up what he has sought in the wastelands and barrow-lands and hinterlands of this desecrated world so ardently.

The possessiveness at having his archive returning to him is a damp and clinging sensation, and it scores a canyon through Jon's decreasingly present mind. Strikes a match in him. People can strike a lot of things, he considers. Strike gold, strike fear.

Strike a bargain.

All the horrors that Magnus wants somewhere to store as he Watches and feasts over a ruined world.

Jon told Martin what he would rather, instead of that owned, sickening half-life.

 _You know what I'll give you,_ Jon says.

There must be limits, he thinks, to what he'd do for Martin, but they've never found the edges of them. Both of them have found the dragons in the corners of their maps, and still the sea goes on.

Jon is not surprised by this depth, the certainty of the choice he is making. No, it's that he's being asked to prove it so soon. Again, and again, and again.

Jon presses his chapped lips to Martin's forehead, listening to the man groan faintly at the pinprick of warmth.

 _You can have what you've been looking for,_ Jon responds, and Magnus is too ingrained in Jon's head for him to hide the obnoxious beacon of his delight.

Martin's stopped shaking from the cold. Jon's still trying to pull their bodies together, merge them into the same space, shield him from the bitterest of gales. Magnus observes his stumbling human efforts, the way his limbs are quaking from the strain of carrying on, the exhaustion dropping stitches in the weave of him.

Jon sees Magnus' thoughts stray like a wandering gaze, and he slams up against them like the snapping of a rotten branch, the crack of a log being caught by flame.

 _If he's safe,_ Jon challenges bluntly, because he can see the plans sprouting up like weeds in infertile grounds, forming primordial in his head, the potential for even more leverage over such a stubborn archivist. _If he is alive, unharmed, left alone. Free from you, or anyone else. Then, I will._

“J'n,” Martin's mumbling, and his lips are muddied with blue. “J'n?”

“I'm here, I'm here.”

“It's... It's snowing?” Martin blinks, confused.

“Shush,” Jon replies, his own lips poorly structuring the words around his shivering. “I'm.... we're getting out of here, just stay with me. I've... I know what we need to do.”

 _He doesn't look well, does he,_ Jonah Magnus pours through his ears nastily. _What if the End should take him? What then, Jon?_

Jon demonstrates exactly will happen if Martin dies by shoving the answer like overstuffing a postbox into Magnus' head till he gags and chokes on it.

It's a simple response, a simple certainty. It leaves Magnus sounding a little breathless, a little less in control, and Jon is bitterly pleased.

 _Then it seems it would be in both of our interests that he... continues, as it were,_ Magnus responds carefully.

Jon doesn't dignify that with a response. Martin hisses in a broken, shuddering breath and Jon is reminded of mechanisms snapping, and they don't have any more time.

It must be desperation in him now, but it feels too like the yawning sky to ground him.

 _Do something useful, and help me,_ he snarls at the squatting occupant in his mind.

Magnus hums, and his presence ruminates, stagnates fatter. Sharper. Spreading fungal to invade corners left undefended.

_Ask me nicely._

_Bloody well do something, or we'll both be dead,_ Jon bites back like something caged and cornered. _And good luck finding another Archivist then._

There's a splitting jolt, a rumble of something crackling, a dis-figuration of petty dissatisfaction that would be painful if Jon wasn't already so splintered, if his body wasn't already so numb. He counts the freckles across Martin's face and bears through it.

This is what Jon does. He keeps Martin safe.

This is just another Peter Lukas. Another monster who wants more of him than he will give them.

_Ask me nicely, Jon._

Shame coils hot and feverish in Jon's guts at the twisting knife of Jonah's gleeful request, that's basking in the triumph of this moment.

Jon presses his face into Martin's ice-crackling curls, and murmurs his name, murmurs apologies, feeling the tears that harden on his face as quickly as they begin to slip down. He presses one, two sealing sorry kisses to his brow and wishes they'd had the time to witness the snow together.

He mouths something into Martin's hair that's swallowed by the wind.

 _Please,_ he says, the words sticky in his chest, knowing Martin will never forgive him for this. _Help me. Please._

Jonah Magnus' voice is toothy and beaming and punctures the soul of him in victory. 

**Author's Note:**

> cws for: manipulation, non-graphic injury, mind-fuckery of the Beholding sort. Let me know if this needs any other tags, and I'll add them.
> 
> EDIT: Now with a [happy ending](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20567243/chapters/53030035/) for those inclined.


End file.
